Determining whether Shakespeare uses archaisms
consciously requires a close examination of his
language word by word. Such scrutiny should
presuppose that the concept and identification of
archaisms for Shakespeare's contemporaries is not
necessarily identical to our own. Fortunately, the Early
Modern English Dictionary Database provides a
means for determining the status of potentially
archaic words based on the early modern
lexicographer's sense of the frequency and tone of
such words. While some lexicographers indicate
explicitly that a word is "old," more often
the archaic tone of a word is suggested only tacitly
by how the term appears in dictionary entries. I will
discuss how such citations and other sources such as
Chaucerian glossaries can provide a starting point
for examining if and how Shakespeare used archaic
words. This examination will provide, in turn, a
means for discussing the nature of archaic terms
which circumvents problematic classifications.

This difficulty of classifying and identifying
archaic terms during Shakespeare's time is
unavoidable, perhaps, when one considers the
linguistic self-consciousness and instability of the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Generally,
definitions seem to slip between the ideas of a
potentially archaic term as (a) old, (b) regional or
rustic, and (c) poetic. In his The Arte of English
Poesie (1589), George Puttenham's recommendation
to poets marks this overlap in the definition of such
terms. He advises:

do not follow Piers Plowman nor Gower nor
Lydgate nor yet Chaucer, for their language is
now out of use with us: neither shall he take the
terms of the North-men. (qtd. Görlach 237)

The distinctions of old, poetic, and regional seem
inclusive and blurred here but, perhaps, all of these
are inter-related aspects in the diachronic
development of an archaism. As Manfred Görlach
points out, regionalism contributes to the
obsolescence of a word when it is associated
increasingly with a non-standard variety, is
stigmatized and falls out of use (139). Such
diachronic specification, however, does not provide a
tidy taxonomy for archaic terms when one recalls that
archaisms were not associated only with lower
registers[1] or regionalism.
Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century,
"old words" were associated increasingly
with poetic diction, especially in bible
translations, or classified as Chaucerisms.

What exists are two quite different senses of archaic
termsa lower register and a higher register.
Apparently, the poet ought to avoid some old words
but exploit others. When they are used, however, it
is clear that such terms would have possessed a
potentially archaic tone in order to be manipulated
for the desired poetic effectthe term would be
recognized as "different" from the standard
idiom but retrievable from within that idiom. This
sense of archaic terms as potentially exploitable
items is discussed by B.R. McElderry Jr. in his
examination of the language of Spenser. He asserts
that poetic terms are extracted from standard
language rather than created or lifted from other
sources:

no one person can "create" a poetic
diction. The most he can do is to embellish
incidentally a relatively standard idiom. The
main poetic effect is latent in the standard
idiom, and it is the poet's business to bring it
out. (McElderry 168)

Following McElderry, I suggest that Shakespeare
also extracts archaic diction in just this manner.
Our linguistic distance from the idiom of
Shakespeare's time, however, does not allow us to
identify intuitively which words are archaic,
especially if they are as "latent" as
McElderry contends in Spenser's case. Early modern
lexicographers and, to a lesser degree, Chaucerian
glossaries such as those by Paul Greaves in 1594 and
Thomas Speght in 1602 have helped me determine the
archaic tone of such words based on their contextual
frequency, that is, in what syntactic situations or
with what other words they most frequently appear.
Such resources also indirectly reveal how Shakespeare
may have changed the typical co-occurrence of words
in collocates or idioms in order to exploit the
latent archaic tone of such words.[2]

My examination of several methodologies for
identifying and describing archaic terms divides into
two approaches: direct and indirect. By a direct
approach I mean the examination of explicit
references to "old words" by early modern
lexicographers or those marked by John Bullokar with
an asterisk. In the instructions to the reader in his
English Expositor (1616), Bullokar explains
that a word marked in this way is "an olde
worde, onely used of some ancient writers and now
growne out of use." Few of the words marked by
Bullokar, however, are used by Shakespeare. When such
terms marked by Bullokar are used by Shakespeare,
these words often appear in the Chaucerian glossaries
of Greaves and Speght. A sample of such words would
include "bale," "cleape,"
"teene," "to weene," and "to
wende."

If such words are generally held to be archaic and/or
Chaucerian, it appears they have a literary
application. In this process such old words are
increasingly isolated to a poetic register. This
suggests that the choice of such words is conscious,
to a certain degree, but also that the words chosen
are recognized as an aspect of the standard idiom in
a sort of poetic sub-categorya kind of a roster
of terms considered infrequent and of a specific
tone. They are of such infrequent use that they
warrant inclusion in Chaucerian glossaries and mark
up in hard-word dictionaries such as Bullokar's Expositor.

Based on my research thus far, I have found very
concrete instances supporting McElderry's comment
that for poetic ends archaic words are extracted from
everyday language. With reference to Shakespeare's
language, I argue that he lifts words which, embedded
in particular collocates and idiomatic phrases,
rarely appear outside of their most frequent
contexts. This brings me to the second and, I
believe, more interesting methodological possibility
for identifying archaic words. This is not by simply
looking them up in reference works but by indirectly
determining their tone based on their contextual
occurrences or grammatical uses. It is this method
which provides a more solid means for suggesting that
Shakespeare used archaic words consciously.

This indirect method requires an understanding of the
nature of fossilized phrases. In these phrases, a
given lexical item is frozen in a set of words. One
item often predicts the other members of the phrase.
A single item can predict what other terms follow it
(which is called right-predictive) or what terms it
follows (left-predictive; Kjellmer 112). For example
the word "nonce" occurs in very limited
collocations in Present Day English. These are
"for the nonce" and as an attributive in
the hyphenated compound "nonce-word." Thus
"nonce" is left-predictive and
right-predictive in Present Day English but in
different phrases. A phrase such as "for the
nonce" should be considered more correctly as
what Göran Kjellmar calls a variable phrase. He
defines such phrases as consisting "of two or
more lexical words, some of them incorporating
function words" (Kjellmer 114). The fixity of
the phrase suggests that it functions as a single
lexical item because it appears most frequently in an
isolated context or functions so, as Kjellmer puts
it, "simply by virtue of being more common"
(Kjellmer 114). In Shakespeare's corpus, an example
of a lexical item frozen in such a phrase is
"nonce" which appears only in the
collocation "for the nonce."

This instance of the phrasal fossilization of
"nonce" can be contrasted with a word like
"fay." Spenser uses "fay" as a
non-fixed collocate; Shakespeare, only in the phrase
"by my fay." Clearly the term has gained
lexemic status as an asservative as it appears in
Shakespeare. The EMEDD supports this view, for
"fay" appears only in this phrase and is
not an unbound lexeme:

(1)
Florio (1598)  no by my fay;
Cockeram (1623)  by my fay.

What I undertook to determine was whether
Shakespeare might extract a potentially archaic word
which had been frozen in a given collocate just as
Spenser ostensibly had with "fay." A
reading of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
revealed two terms that the EMEDD entries suggest are
found more frequently in set phrases or consistently
predict other items. These are "maugre" and
"belike." The Oxford English Dictionary
defines "maugre" as archaic in its
prepositional function. The EMEDD citations dramatize
this point. The most consistent re-occurrence of
"maugre" is in a set phrase of a function
and content words (usually a part of the body). These
phrases provide definitions for such words as
"violenter," "invitus,"
"aldispetto" or "malgrado":

The archaic tone of "maugre" seems to be
exploited to translate a proverb in Cotgrave (1611)
while Cockeram (1623) includes it in his dictionary
of "hard English words." The archaic sense
suggested by Cotgrave and Cockeram is dramatized by
the citations (2), since "maugre" appears
most frequently in a semi-variable phrase of long
standing (i.e., from 1538-1599). None of the
citations provides a purely prepositional function
for the word. This function is revealed only in those
set phrases which reflect a sense of the word's
productivity. Thus the citations implicitly suggest
that "maugre" is most common in such
phrases rather than as a productive preposition.
Shakespeare, however, does not use the term as it is
cited by lexicographers but as a preposition which is
not restricted to governing particular content words
of a given semantic field (which had been parts of
the body):

A word considered a component of a set phrase in
the dictionaries of Shakespeare's time appears here
as a poetic or archaic or hard word.

Based on a comparison of these collocations in the
EMEDD and in Shakespeare's works, I believe that
"maugre" in Shakespeare's time is on its
way to becoming fully fossilized in a phrase which
functions phrasally as an adverb. This distinction
provided his audience with the sense of this word as
old. By way of analogy, one might consider how many
set phrases in Present Day English contain terms
which do not function outside of such phrases or
could not be correctly used by speakers outside those
particular phrases. In the expression "to
boot"a lexemic adverbial tagfor
instance, "boot" is not known to many
speakers of English as something other than footwear
or a computer operation.[3]

"Belike" functions somewhat like
"maugre." Unlike maugre, however, it is not
identified by the Oxford English Dictionary as
archaic. Interestingly, "belike" underwent
a functional shift from a verb to an adverb from
Middle English to Early Modern English. Citations of
the EMEDD suggest that "belike" quickly
underwent a collocational freeze which was
accompanied by the loss of the verb. Of thirty-one
matches in the EMEDD, only three are verbs and the
remainder are adverbs. The distribution of these
functions is reflected in their lexicographers.
Florio (1598) provides "belike" as a
translation of the Italian verb of obligation
("dovere") while Cotgrave (1611) uses it as
an adverb in a right-predictive function word
phrase"belike because." Cotgrave uses
this phrase when he is about to provide a definition
of which he is not certain:

These instances do not represent an idiom as much
as the idiolect of this lexicographer. What this
co-occurrence does illustrate, however, is the
non-productivity of the term. For example,
"belike" is not the first term to come to
the lexicographers' minds when they are defining the
Italian "forse" ("perhaps").
Matches for "forse" are:

These instances illustrate that
"perhaps" is the term which most
lexicographers first consider when they define
foreign terms of the same meaning. Though
"belike" had established an adverbial
function to the peril of its verbal function, it
never appears as a synonym for "perhaps" in
any citation.[4]

Cotgrave's use of "belike" (4) appears to
reflect considerable certainty in the ability of
"belike" to convey clearly an adverbial
function. He illustrates this in his mannerist
alliterative grouping of "belike" and
"because." I believe this suggests that the
term has some affective or literary potential because
of this alliterative context but since the earliest
citation of "belike" is 1533, can I argue
that it had already become archaic in Shakespeare's
language? Shakespeare uses "belike" more
often than he uses "perhaps" in a ratio of
43:28. I think he is doing just what McElderry
suggests is part of the manipulation of poetic
dictionopting for the lesser used word, marking
the difference between a frequent word and an
infrequent one. This word was perhaps a "hard
word": a possibility reinforced by the fact that
its adverbial function was sufficiently questionable
to warrant the additionthough
short-livedof the adverbial affix
"-ly" (OED a 1552).

The examples of "maugre" and, to a lesser
degree, "belike" illustrate that context is
an essential consideration when determining the
potentially archaic status of a word. This holds true
for the contexts constructed for archaic words. The
importance of syntactic context is illustrated by the
word "welkin" which Shakespeare shares with
E.K.'s glosses of Spenser and Greaves's Chauceriana
glossary. This Old English word for "cloud"
was pushed into the archaic/poetic register when the
Old Norse loan "sky" functioned as the
spoken register term. The ways in which Shakespeare
uses these two words of roughly synonymous meaning
and inter-related development may shed light on how
he utilizes archaic terms generally. While
Shakespeare had used "welkin" 19 times, he
uses "sky" 48 times. "Sky" is
productive in compounds and affixes
("sky-aspiring," "skyey,"
"skyish," "sky-planted").
"Welkin," however, does not share in this
formational productivity. This suggests, therefore,
that its lexical status is fixed and does not fall
under the rubric of day-to-day terms which are
productive. In fact, the use of "welkin" in
such a way may have been too mannered, if it is
already considered a poetic or archaic term.[5] One might conclude that
poetic or archaic items could not be over-determined
by attributive or phrasal contexts when used for
poetic ends. Just as "maugre" was
de-contextualized or extracted from its more frequent
phrasal occurrences with the result of a
foregrounding of its prepositional function and
archaic tone, so "welkin" functions
generally freed from phrasal and affixed contexts.

The words I have discussed are only a few of the many
wordsboth content and functionthat I have
examined. What this study has illustrated so far is
that archaismand implicitly poetic
dictionexists within the standard idiom.
Archaisms, then, could be considered terms which are
latently embedded within the standard idiom rather
than within a poetic register set apart. In some
instances archaic tonality may just be a matter of
recognizing that the status of old words is based on
their relation to the standard idiom by the way they
survive in that idiom as fossilized phrases. Such
generalizations suggest that archaisms could have
been readily available for use not only in the
reference texts of Shakespeare's time but phrasally
frozen in his day-to-day language.

Finally, I must answer the question this paper asks:
Does Shakespeare use archaisms consciously? I must
say both "yes" and "no."
"Yes" when he extracts archaisms from
variable phrases such as "maugre his head"
but "no" when he uses a highly unbound
lexeme which the dictionaries cite as archaic such as
"teen" or "ween." A
"yes" is my reply, however, when he
manipulates two words of the same meaning such as
"sky" and "welkin" quite
differently. The extraction of words from fossilized
contextsas in the case of
"maugre"and the non-determined
contexts of othersas "welkin"
demonstratessuggests an intentionality on the
bard's part. An analysis of the context in which
these words appear most frequently in the EMEDD and
of how Shakespeare employs them provides a starting
point for determining the level of his consciousness
in the manipulation of such old words.

Notes

1. I use the term
"register" to refer to the stylistic levels for
which words are chosen. The highest or most formal
register is literary language; the lowest, colloquial or
day-to-day speech.

2. John Sinclair distinguishes
between the lexical co-occurrence of collocates and
idioms: "we call co-occurrences idioms if we
interpret the co-occurrence as giving a single unit of
meaning. If we interpret the occurrence as the selection
of two related words, each of which keeps some meaning of
its own, we call it a collocation" (Sinclair 172).